Background Information:
Reese Fullerton is the Director of the Office of Workforce Training and Development for the state of New Mexico. An attorney, mediator and facilitator, Reese has spent many years facilitating discussions in public disputes about water and other natural resources, education and human rights in local, state, regional, national and international settings.
Anne Fullerton is a counselor for children and has been an active member of the not-for-profit community in Sante Fe, New Mexico. She has founded and directed organizations which provide funds to individuals throughout the community for: engaging students in volunteer activities, creating student-written articles for local newspapers, and providing volunteers and other support for elementary schools in economically-stressed areas of town. Anne also works with other nonprofit groups to make Sante Fe a more compassionate place to live.
Interviewer: Megan Scribner is a freelance editor and has worked on several books including: Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach; Living the Questions: Essays Inspired by the Work and Life of Parker J. Palmer; Stories of the Courage to Teach: Honoring the Teacher's Heart; and Navigating the Terrain of Childhood: Guidebook for Meaningful Parenting and Heartfelt Discipline. She has also worked as a researcher, scribe and evaluator of programs.
March 2003
| Reese | I’ve been a lobbyist for the New Mexico Conference of Churches in a volunteer capacity. I do work around health, education and taxation around family services and health and social services. I sit on a board for the New Mexico Conference of Churches which focuses on housing and health and education and social services, welfare issues and environmental issues. So right now those are my volunteering focuses. I do a lot of assisting, connecting, maybe enhancing conversations between people, and lobbying for sure. In terms of hands-on, we just had a weekend with Bread for the Journey (www.breadforthejourney.org) and we were listening to all the people who have gotten little tiny donations and medium-tiny donations from us. These were people who are doing plays or puppeteers or hands-on art. That’s the really hands-on part—those people that we’ve given little grants to are really engaged. For instance there is a guitar player who teaches juveniles in a detention center to play the guitar. He so inspired a woman that when she went back to California, she wrote him and said she wanted to buy each of these teenagers a guitar so when they walk out the door of the detention facility they will have a guitar in their hands. |
| Megan | What a wonderful thing. |
| Reese | That kind of direct contact is not really something that I’ve had in my life. A lot of my work is with people who do have that kind of contact, who call and ask for advice about this or that. Or I’m part of a board that’s focused on that topic or issue or is trying to create some health policy around the structural part of doing work better. That’s my focus. |
| Megan | Can you say a little bit about the Santa Fe Mountain Center? |
| Reese | At the Santa Fe Mountain Center, we work with kids at risk, adjudicated delinquents and families. We work with populations that are at high risk for getting AIDS. We work with Native American communities throughout the southwest, especially in New Mexico and just over the Arizona border on the Navajo reservation. We have a health component as well. And so we work with a lot of different communities. I’ve been on the board for about 20 years. By being on the board, I’m having impact in terms of making sure our structures and our people and our board and our staff reflect who we serve and that we do the best job we can. And after 20 years, I think we’re serving our clientele and the people who need our services better and better because we’re listening to their needs better. |
| Megan | That’s great. That’s a really good feeling. Anne, do you want to fill me in? |
| Anne | Sure. Well, I’m also on the board of Bread for the Journey and do a lot of the interactions between Bread for the Journey and the groups for which provide physical sponsorship. We’re in the process of phasing that out. We do have one group that we’ve worked [with] for a long time. So I have been involved in the start-up and development of lots of not-for-profits in New Mexico for 24 years. I do a lot of volunteer consulting about how to form an organization, how to work with a board of directors, how to be involved, how to write proposals, how to get volunteers, how to keep volunteers, that kind of thing. So Bread for the Journey is one piece. Another piece is Outside In, which is the organization that has the fellow that teaches guitar classes for kids in detention centers. I’m the vice-president of that board. We, Bread for the Journey, were the initial fiscal sponsor for Outside In. It’s an organization modeled on Bread and Roses which provides live performances for isolated populations, people in detention centers, prisons, nursing homes, and treatment centers. I am a counselor and I work with kids in the schools. I do that on a volunteer basis and have for years. I work with predominantly one school right now that’s almost entirely Spanish-speaking. They have a lot of issues that come out of behavioral issues but they tend to have language issues as well. Although my Spanish is not fluent, I can understand enough and communicate well enough for them to get it, so we do okay. And then Reese and I organized a “community sing”—people come to our house about every six weeks just to sing. We have a friend who is a choir director and a pianist and she comes and leads us and we sing anything and everything. It’s a delightful time. |
| Megan | It sounds wonderful. What a good release for everyone to be a part of that. I’m sure that it gets in touch with a part of ourselves that we don’t have a chance to very often. |
| Anne | Well, exactly. It’s an opportunity just to let it all out. And we have another group of recently divorced or separated friends who come for “Wednesday night in the hood” and we have a potluck dinner. So there are a variety of things we do. I spend a lot of time with people supporting the transitions and the challenges in the life they’re leading, and connecting them with resources or support systems—one thing or another. That’s what I do all the time. Sometimes it’s like my family. My family is all on the east coast, but a lot of the time [my extended family’s become the] people around the community that I’ve come across in a variety of different places or who have become friends over time. |
| Megan | You both talked about a lot of different work and areas where you connect with people. Do you see kind of a vision behind your work, something that ties it all together in terms of what brings you to it? |
| Anne | Well, that’s something I know I have been trying to understand. The vision is that communities have to be tended to and have to be cared for. And somebody needs to have that as a major focus. Things don’t just happen because you live in the same place and you go to the same school. You actually have to develop ways for people to feel as if they belong. I have spent a lot of time keeping family networks connected and keeping community networks and friendship networks connected mostly because I believe in the value of the extended family and the neighborhood and the community as being the place where we best thrive. So for me that’s the vision. |
| Megan | Reese, do you have a vision? |
| Reese | I don’t have anything to add to that. I think possibly more of my focus would be on—policy is such a sterile word—but the structure around which we do serve. We do make a difference in people’s lives and oftentimes that will come out in a legislative or a policy way. That is very important to me. Being involved in your community and that community is for me—the family, city, state and the international community—and how we go about talking about it and then making the decisions around that is something that I really like to have an impact on. I try to get people see that broader way of viewing how intervention can happen. |
| Megan | Can you talk about what brought you first to this kind of work? You both have been saying that you’ve been involved in this for at least 20-odd years in different forms. What first brought you in this direction? |
| Reese | My family, I guess. The first thing we did after we got married, we moved to Washington and I worked for the commission on civil rights and equal employment opportunity commission and Ann was working for the DC public schools. I think that’s just who we are. Being born into our families and seeing my family—our families—volunteer, and be involved in a lot of different stuff—that was just a part of life. That’s what you did and politics was part of it. Being committed to the community was part of it, sort of the one-on-one connection, as well as looking at the structures and making sure decisions were being made as well as possible and influencing those as much as you could. |
| Anne | I think that would be mine also. From the time I was tiny, I was involved. My family was involved in communities and bringing people into our home and bringing people from other countries, from other communities, from other lives, from other economic levels into our lives. I know that was true for Reese, as well. There was never a question—that would be the life that I would lead—the “exactly how” has been evolving. I don’t think it’s ever been static in terms of choosing one focus, one organization, one issue and going for it. It’s more connecting wherever there seems to be a need and wherever there seems to be a way in which we can best serve. |
| Megan | When you both talk about your families—were there any stories that you were told or a family motto or sayings that you tap into? Was there any way that volunteering was talked about in any self-conscious way or was it just done? |
| Anne | We heard about our grandmothers, our grandfathers, our aunts and uncles, our cousins. The family lore was always service, who was politically serving, who was taking people in off the streets, who was feeding them, who was incorporating them into the family, who adopted kids from different places because they didn’t have a life to lead. So every story had that kind of component that was just a part of who we were as a family. And the mottoes were: “to whom much is given much is expected,” “communities depend on people,” “democracy doesn’t exist unless you’re a participant,” and “you can’t expect things to happen if you’re not willing to make them happen yourself.” There’s a whole expectation—that’s how someone lived in the world, and it was a thread that ran through everything. |
| Reese | And that’s very similar for me. We’re lucky in that regard. Modeling and being part of the feeling that you must choose to stand up and have an influence, that was just an expectation and a model and a given. |
| Megan | And I assume just from what you’ve said about how you bring people into your house for these potlucks and things that your three sons were exposed to it much in the same way? |
| Anne | Absolutely. We’ve had lots of people living with us from Mexico, Switzerland, all over the country, younger kids and then they bring their friends or their brothers or their dogs. So it’s been an evolving household generally with lots of people, people in transition, people going through separations, people going through divorces, living here, bringing their family with them, not bringing their family with them. It’s been. . .Yes, our boys know that as a way of life. |
| Megan | They couldn’t help but pick up on that. Do you have a common community or tradition that you also draw strength from for your giving, whether it be religious, cultural, or otherwise? |
| Reese | That’s a good one. In terms of religious, I’m a non-practicing United Church of Christ Catholic. |
| Megan | Now there’s quite a story. |
| Reese | I’ve never said that, ever. That is the first time I’ve ever put those together, but it’s really true. I think my heart of hearts and my soul is Catholic and I’m not happy with where Catholicism has gone. I think there’s a liberal basis, a progressive basis to that, and I come from a very conservative Republican family and I feel one with that history. I just think that the values that I heard my parents always express I’m just applying and they just happen to be applied in a way that isn’t on a surface conservative Republican. And so there’s a real spiritual basis that comes from growing up and being Catholic, going through Jesuit college and law school, that was really about being of service to the world and making the world a better place because of being alive. And then there’s a real liberal progressive community and basis and core. So I would say that those two and then just the values of friends in the community. That would be my answer. |
| Anne | I grew up in the United Church of Christ, but my mother had grown up Catholic and I went to Quaker College. I would say that in terms of a practicing day-to-day religion, no. But I went through a process a long time ago, an Ignatian retreat which is the closest I’ve come in my adult years to finding that there’s a place for me in an established close Christian tradition. So definitely I would say I’m a Christian, deeply, but Buddhism has been extremely important. I’ve done a number of retreats and the learning of that meditative process and then moving from there into the Ignatian retreats...which are a very traditional Catholic, but at this point a fairly radical, traditional Catholic approach to the study of the teachings of Christ. It’s certainly not because we attend church that we do what we do, but it’s certainly based on what we believe to be the teachings of the churches that we have come from. |
| Megan | As you think back over the work and all the forms of giving that you all do, what’s the greatest learning you’ve received from doing this work? |
| Anne | I guess for me it’s a constant humbling in the face of what people’s spirits are asked to endure. How they are able to find hope, joy, faith, trust in the midst of very challenging, abusive, painful, terrifying, fearful kinds of experiences. So for me there’s a lot of gratefulness, a lot of humility, a lot of respect, and a commitment to being more faithful, more trusting, more willing to share what I have, whether it’s from my spirit, my pocketbook, my home or from my physical well-being. All of those are parts of what are important for me in every moment with the people and the organizations that I’ve worked with. I think the other learning has been an organizational sort of learning which is realizing that we tend to put structure, to build structures, whether it’s in families, whether it’s in groups of people, whether it’s in organizations, communities, nations. We’ve built structures that we tend to support and then we start supporting those structures and the structures may not be serving the purpose or the people any longer and yet we feel a loyalty to the structure rather than to the values and the people they were built for. That’s another one that I’ve been struggling with a lot, especially in working with people who are trying to make things happen in the community and want an organization to do it but begin to then build the organization and lose the work. So those would be my big learnings, I think. |
| Reese | And certainly the latter is a big deal for me. On a personal level, I just feel sheer joy about the various ways that people can serve one another and can break out of old stuff to new stuff. I just love people and so whatever we do, I feel a joy at being around [them] and learning and watching and observing different ways of being. I was a guardian ad infinitum for abused and neglected children in the 80s for about six years and a lobbyist at the legislature. [What have I learned?] The joy of seeing the intentions of people genuinely trying to figure out how best to overcome challenges in their lives and how important it is to have as many opportunities as possible around them so that when they’re ready to make a positive choice, they have that choice to rise to the occasion. I guess I’m just lucky to be around a lot of times when that’s happened and that’s sheer joy. |
| Anne | I think the joys are the people always. I think it’s the delight of being with people, the surprise of people, the way in which people find humor and feel thoughtful and caring and how kindness shows up in all sorts of amazing places. That’s the joyful part. |
| Megan | That’s great. Listening to the two of you, I don’t know if there is a time that you don’t give, but try to think about a time when you move into giving. Is there a sense of the strength that you tap into at that moment when you’re about to join with another person in something like this? Maybe it’s more the joy of being around the people that you’re talking about. |
| Reese | There’s not a time—it’s not like a radio that you can turn off or on. It’s certainly not that, when you’re on or when you’re off. But there’s certainly a time when the joyful moments, when the connective movements aren’t there . . . Certainly the last couple of answers have been around the people moments and so what are some non-people moments around giving? That certainly would be fundraising. There are times when you have to make 15 or 20 phone calls or write 15 or 20 notes to people, and I’d rather be cooking an egg for breakfast for Anne or I’d rather be doing something else in a volunteer capacity or any other capacity, breathing, walking. In those moments when everything is not just flowing to what you just do naturally, then, yes, I think you have to tap into: What am I doing this for? If I don’t do this someone else won’t do it. Or I may be better at this than a lot of people who say they hate to do it. I hate to do it, but they hate to do it and maybe they really can’t churn out as much as I can churn out by the effort that I’m doing. So get with it, Reese, and stop whining. Most people hate to do that, but I’ve done it for so long, I guess I still hate to do it, but goodness, gracious we all hate to do it. So you go somewhere and say hey, wait a minute, what are you doing this for? I think that’s sort of a vanilla answer. |
| Megan | No, that works. I think that’s great. |
| Reese | Certainly those times come, but when you’re dealing with the part of a moment that’s around people and that’s around connections, you don’t have to go to a place for finding out where I get the energy because I get the energy from that moment. What’s the test you take to find out what kind of personality you are, the Myers-Briggs [model of personality] test. If I was introvert, then if I walked into a group of people, I might have to look for strength for that moment because I would feel drained, but I’m not. I’m an extrovert so I’m just being energy when I’m in that connected moment. It’s just like plugging into everybody so then the strength just runs towards me because of who I am. But there are times when I have to gear up because I don’t like to do something or another that is about giving and that’s mostly around fundraising, I suspect. |
| Anne | I guess for me the hardest ones are when I’ve been working with somebody over a long period of time and their worst habits keep recurring. And I realize that we’re having the same conversation that we’ve had for the last 20-something years. I have to trust that there’s a reason to just keep the connection, that the connection is valuable whether or not change happens, whether or not solace happens, whether or not there is a recognition, a newness, a joyfulness. To know that something about being willing to be with someone in this life, whatever this life happens to be at the moment, is worth doing. That requires some work because I certainly like it when people go, “Oh, yes!” and are thrilled. Or say “Thanks so much,” or “Oh boy, I feel so much better,” or come up with a new issue, whatever. That doesn’t happen in life all the time. But it’s still important to be there, and so that’s something that I guess would be hard for me. |
| Megan | When you think about giving—and the flip side of it which is receiving—we sometimes find receiving harder. Sometimes we have a harder time talking about it as well. Is there a story or a time when you received something from someone that has helped to shape who you are and how you give in return? |
| Reese | I think, again, it’s in our daily lives we’re blessed. Last night it was with one of the people in transition who lives in our apartment. Instead of having dinner in our part of the house, we had dinner in her part of the house with her three children who have been raised with our kids and the girlfriend of one of her three children. And for us to be in that community in their presence, just be able to hear their glees and troubles and “consternations” (they’re all in their twenties) is a blessing. So last night was a big gift, a huge gift. And so the gifts. . . I think people are really giving all the time and we are around people who give tremendously to us. It revs us up and it feels wonderful and we’re part of it because some of that giving time may be two ways at the same time, so it’s giving-receiving without a “G” or an “R” attached because it’s flowing. |
| Anne | Most of the time, I think. |
| Reese | I’d say most of the time that’s true. Certainly last night is a good example of that because certainly we’re providing—I mean, I don’t know if they’re feeling that we’re providing—a house and a place in the community and a place where they really feel whole and safe. |
| Anne | I’d say they do. |
| Reese | But at the same time we’re not going to compete which way it was flowing. I couldn’t have been receiving more than that, I would’ve just floated over the top if it’d been anything more to be joyful about than last night, and often I think in a way our home is that way. We have a place where people feel safe, couples who are separated can come together for Thanksgiving and be safe together at our house. Even though their lives are not together and not happy, they’re happy here. We’re giving and receiving at that moment in that way tremendously. So I think a lot of the answer to that question is that it just happens all the time to us because we’re part of whatever is going on and we’re gaining so much. |
| Anne | I think there are a couple of very specific stories. We have a dear friend who died of cancer a number of years ago. Her family asked us to be the sort of the guides for the service for her, and that was an amazing gift to us. We miss her constantly, but having been included that closely in the web that was missing her made us feel less isolated and more a part of a group that we were sharing a real loss with. Another similar time was when Reese’s sister’s husband was dying of cancer and I was able to go up and be with them at a very critical sort of last choice moment of where he was going to put his energy. It was just the most amazing sense that I was allowed and even wanted in the household at that moment and was able to play a part that was helpful. That to me was just a huge gift. It’s one that I will always feel as if I have been given more than I could possibly have even tried to give at that moment. The fact that I was there, they were able to allow it to be helpful, so it was great. I think those are sort of monumental life moments but they do happen all the time. You know, there’s always that back and forth of being if you’re part of someone’s life, that’s a big gift. If they’re willing to let you in on all the levels, that’s huge and it’s something that gives value and meaning to our lives. |
| Megan | That’s great. It’s a wonderful description of how things can be giving and receiving, the gifts that are exchanged so to speak in moments like that for both sides. As you think about just the kind of legacy of giving and receiving that happens in the world, I know some of the things you said already about what you do in the world speaks to this, but one of the questions we had is what do you believe the world needs most at this point in terms of giving? |
| Anne | I guess I feel as if it most needs to choose trust over fear in every minute of every day and that the gift we can give to each other is to choose to trust rather than choose to fear in every thought and every action that we have and make. |
| Reese | And if that happened, the world will be choosing connection over isolation, I think it’s a web back and forth. If you isolate, fear goes up and trust goes down. If you connect, trust goes up. If you trust and you step into it, you have connection. For me, that would be the other part of that. It really needs people who need to be connected and [rather than] isolated. I guess that goes into what people do for each other. It speaks to the Internet. I think there’s a certain trust, familiarity, connectedness that the Internet is bringing. Anne was just reading something yesterday that it took the Iraqi war protest movement to do in six months what it took four and a half years in the Vietnam War. That’s the good news. I think that all builds the trust over fear which is critical in the connectivity of all of us rather than the isolation. So the more we can do in every way to feed that trust and connectedness, the more we’ll be impacting the world. I think it’s a rough time for this world. And so being smart about being conscious, intentional and using the mediums of the world is part of the challenge for me at least. I feel like I’m citizen of a rogue nation. Certainly the three of us probably are in the top one percent of the world in terms of being influential and having impact on decisions that have impact on everybody in the world. Yet I think it’s a time of feeling very powerless for me and so remembering that the little ways are still the ones that are important. And making choices for being as effective in communicating trust and connectivity is really important. |
| Megan | It’s interesting as you say about the difficult times that we’re in at the moment. I was just editing a piece the other day that used the [same] words—that we’re in a difficult time. That’s how I feel, but I’m not always quite sure why this should be such a difficult time. It’s curious to me how we landed where we are. I feel, as you say, pretty powerless and pretty confused. |
| Anne | It’s true. My hopeful part says that we are really about to move into a whole new way of envisioning how we operate as people in a global situation rather than a nation state situation. And that this is the last hurrah of the nation state trying to keep their power base as clear and as forceful as it is, so that’s my little hopeful spin on it. |
| Megan | Well, I’ll take that because I need something hopeful. When we were trying to name this project, we started with our subtitle which was “Many Faces of Giving and Receiving.” As a group, we were playing around with that. Then we liked the words “generosity of spirit” as a larger picture of what this feels like. I’ve heard you use the word serve or service a lot. I’m taking an informal poll around “generosity of spirit”—if that means anything to you, if you connect with it at all, or if there is a different way that you would say something like that. |
| Reese | That’s interesting. I don’t know if I put words to it, but being really close—you know who Wayne Muller1 is? (See Footnote.) |
| Megan | Yes. |
| Reese | Being close to Wayne, being friends with Wayne—he’s so articulate and gifted in the turn of the phrase and in expressing from a very deep place, articulating those words, those feelings and the spirit in terms of words. I’m a professional mediator and facilitator, and this part of our training says don’t use the word “generosity.” So your question about generosity has hit me in the past because that’s a word that really comes from and is part of Wayne’s rich lexicon. I’m mimicking Wayne right now, I think, in terms of his richness of language. I find it’s sometimes a bit antithetical to “not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.” There’s a part of me that says the word generosity is a big word, a magnanimous word, and I don’t feel particularly generous. And there are times when I may feel generous but it just makes me a little awkward sometimes; service, as well, and so in a sense and I don’t know whether there is a word. Maybe any word when you start talking about what you’re asking us, why should we be on this phone rather than a million other people with a hundred miles of us if there are that many, 400 miles of us. You’d find a million closer but we have to run through a lot of cows and horses. Why should we be having this conversation with you? There are [many] people who live their lives in giving and who give and take and live and have a generosity of spirit. They just do, they just live, they just give, and yet there is something about our lives—that we hold open our home to people and that really makes a difference in people’s lives. But is it a generosity of spirit? I don’t know. When I hear that and it’s aimed at myself...If it’s aimed at someone else, it’s easier. So I’m not helping you out. I’m saying let’s just not use any words. Of course, that’s not what your question was. |
| Megan | It is helpful, Reese, because I think it’s one of the challenges when you’re working in these areas and trying to describe things. You obviously have to use words [and] I often find that the words fail or get too large as I’m saying them. I have to keep putting my mouth around them, so I tend to look for the smaller phrases to do what the larger words try to do. |
| Reese | Taking those “opportunities” and being ready for them . . . While you were talking, I was thinking of this word from the 70s. The meanest guy in the prison, bar none. A lifer, mean, negative, nasty. If you got close to him, he’d hit you, spit on you, bite you. He was in solitary all the time. And when he got out of solitary, he went into the highest lock-up that we had in the state. And one day he said, “I want to see the warden,” and he came to see the warden and the warden said, “Yes.” Number one, there was a “yes.” He came to see the warden and he was bound and gagged—basically he could barely move to get there because if he could move, he would hurt you. And this guy said, “I want to get an education. I want to get my GED and I want to get a college degree.” And the warden said, “Why, now?” He said, “I’m ready. I’m bored. I’m tired of all this stuff.” And so the warden said, “Fine, you get one chance.” And several years later he was in charge of the computer key operators before we had all the new computers, the key punch operation for Xerox in the prison. Four or five years later he was the head of prison industries in Ohio, and he came back and was a management official in our prison system. And then he committed suicide later on when he retired. He was really a thug and probably one of the most powerful people I’ve ever met. Did he have a generous spirit? I don’t know. He probably had no mistakes at the Xerox key punching because he’d beat the hell out of somebody. He had a lot of positive impact on a lot of people. He didn’t get a lot of kudos and most people didn’t know him at the right time. So just being around, choosing life, choosing the opportunities and the positive parts that people can bring to their own lives and if you can touch that and make happen, that’s good, and putting words around it gives me the “queasies” sometimes. |
| Megan | Right. That’s a great story. I’m going to have to sit with that one for a while. Anne, did you want to add anything to that? |
| Anne | No, I think I have the same sense. I don’t think it’s grandiose in any way and I think it’s a very natural human desire and that we get either scared out of it or our experience isn’t positive and we don’t quite know what to do with it or we feel who knows what range of different things. But I think it’s a very natural human propensity to give and to receive and that it’s not utterly remarkable. It’s very normal and that to tell the stories of how normal it is and how it happens in so many different ways is really the value, not the value of making it something more wonderful or unusual or highlighted. And so that would be in terms of the words, just to be real clear that this is not about saying this is something amazingly unusual. These just happen to be some of the ways. |
| Megan | That’s really helpful, Anne. I appreciate that and it leads right into what I was going to ask you next which is just what would you most like to see come of a project like this? What do you think would be most helpful in your work or in your world or in the larger world if you were trying to direct this project? |
| Anne | I guess for me looking around, making it clear to people that generosity does happen in a whole variety of ways. I don’t know whether it’s feeding it through groups that exist, feeding it through Internet messages, feeding it through books or through series of cards. I just feel it’s really important that people know that this is going on all the time and that what they do does matter and that it is worthy of keeping up and being recognized. Even if it feels as if they’re just sort of a little cog in this enormous wheel that’s going nowhere. It does matter and it matters on a regular basis that we all do it and keep on doing it for each other. To recognize that it’s a circle that comes round and round and round all the time. I think in terms of philanthropic activity, we’re aware that the structures of philanthropic organizations and private foundations and family foundations seem to be getting more complex. Therefore the willingness to trust and give generously to the person who always saves all the dogs in the town or who brings in somebody to stay for the week when their water pipe bursts or who is always the one that’s thinking up a new project to get people together. Those are the people that Bread for the Journey likes to support because we feel as if that’s where the work really is. And a lot of the philanthropic community is trying to move away from that to sort of more measurable, accountable systemic changes that will have a measurable impact on the world for the future. And yes, those are good too, but I guess if this is going toward the philanthropic community as well as just toward individuals, I would be really telling the stories for the philanthropic community to see that supporting the teachers who always bring extra food, extra clothes, extra stuff into the classroom for the kids that they know never, ever, ever have it at home. Or the teachers that arranged to make sure that somebody pays for the field trip for the kids that otherwise would not get there. Those teachers do this all the time and they just do it because they couldn’t imagine not doing it. Well, that’s worthy of supporting. Or the [healthcare worker] who knows that there are kids that could be saved from having chronic ear infections and chronic sinus infections if they had access to a prescription fund where the healthcare worker could just say go to this drug store and they will give it to you because the prescription’s written for you and you don’t have to pay anything. Well, those are things that happen all the time and are worthy of support. We don’t need to have a big application form for them and we don’t need to have everybody vetted and fingerprinted and made sure that they’re not going to be harmful. We just need to have a community that knows who’s in their community and what they’re doing and trust them. |
| Reese | Now Megan, do you think I’m going to add anything? |
| Megan | I don’t know how you could. |
| Reese | That’s the message and to make all the efforts in the world to get that message to people who need to hear it for hope, people who need to hear it because they’re providing or could be providing resources for it. |
| Megan | It’s wonderful to hear it expressed so well. It does give me heart and gives me a heartening sense of where this can go. I thank you for that. You are obviously very busy people because you’re giving so much and I really appreciate the gift of your time today. This has been wonderful. |
1 WAYNE MULLER is an ordained minister, a therapist, and an author. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, he has spent the last twenty-five years working closely with some of the most disadvantaged members of society. He is the founder of Bread for the Journey, a national, nonprofit charity serving the poor and underprivileged. He is also the founder of the Institute for Engaged Spirituality, Senior Scholar with the Fetzer Institute, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Wayne Muller is the author of the national bestseller Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood and How, Then, Shall We Live? His latest book is entitled Learning to Pray: How We Find Heaven on Earth.